Influencers Map
Article written by Kristina Drury – founder of TYTHEdesign
Looking for ways to maintain reach with your community can be a challenge. When starting up a new endeavor you choose the most obvious paths such as popular blogs or specific stores to get in front of that community. However, after that first push it can be hard to reach that next round of people or re-engage your early adopters.
When I run across this challenge for TYTHEdesign or for any of my clients, we use a ‘design thinking’ activity called the Influencers Map, to identify all of the external elements (people, places, things, press…) that influence our community. If you can identify their behaviors, such as reading mommy blogs or watching specific TV shows, you will be able to identify new opportunities of outreach.
So how to create an influencers map?
- Using post-it notes, a wall or a whiteboard, identify as many of the external influences of your community as you can.
- Identify what your community READS (note… if they are teenagers don’t be presumptuous to think they read the newspaper… be realistic).
- Identify popular TV program or stations that your community WATCHES
- Identify what and who your community LISTENS to (friends, family, co-workers religious leaders, politicians, musicians… Be honest, not all products will engage each of these external influencers)
- Identify where your group is most EXPOSED to ADVERTISING (if you community is an on-line community think of popular sites or think of your community mode of transportation)
- Once you have as many post-its as you see fit in each category above, on a large paper or whiteboard, draw one large circle filling two-thirds of the page, then draw another circle inside about half the size and lastly place your user in the center.
- Then take your post-its and place each ‘influencer’ in the first ring if they have large impact or in the second if they have passive impact. For example, someone your community speaks to regularly will have more impact that a poster on a bus.
- Once all post-its have been placed on the map, you should be able to identify new possible opportunities, within the first circle, to reach your community. For example, if friends and blogs are the most important influencers – then perhaps your next campaign will be focus at blogs and give discount to friends who recommend another.
One thing to remember is that before you can reach your community you must know your community. If you can’t answer the question of what they read, watch, listen to or are exposed to then you need to do more research (both in person through interview/observation and on paper) about your community. Also, make sure you are identifying mediums that match your products or message as well. Just because your community read the newspaper doesn’t mean it’s the right avenue if you have an on-line product, for example.
To learn more about how to use this tool or have any questions about how to adapt it to your user or challenge please contact me.
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KRISTINA DRURY is an expert in design thinking and the Executive Director of TYTHEdesign, a consultancy serving the social sector based in New York City. TYTHEdesign uses design-based approaches to support the goals and needs of agencies in the social sector, drawing on communication and organizational design to increase the impact of their work. Feel free to contact her if you have questions at all! She’s here to help
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3 Female Design Students Who Shake The Kitchen Loose: Household Appliances of the Future
Electrolux 2011 Competition Female Finalists
Every year Electrolux puts out a brief on one of today’s design challenges. Open to design students who dare to dream about ever-advancing household convenience, it’s fun to see the innovation that emerges. This year’s brief for “intelligent mobility” is explained here in this video:
“From a field of 1,300, the top 25 concepts have been chosen from designers based in 14 countries across the world. Australia, New Zealand and Poland are represented by three entries each whilst Canada, the Czech Republic, France, South Korea and the USA have two representatives each.”
Sadly, out of 25, there were only 3 women chosen. I can’t say this is the fault of Electrolux but maybe just a case of the number of qualified women who entered so let’s put the number aside and give a round of applause for the 3 women who have been named finalists (in no particular order):
(1)
Simona Hruskova (Czech Republic) created the EMS Cooker, a band that wraps around your wrist, uses your natural bodyheat, and is then used to heat food a hotplate or keep your coffee warm.
(2)
Elizabeth Reuter (USA) created a mobile kitchen which takes up almost no space and offers everything you need to prepare a meal.

(3)
Roseanne de Bruin (New Zealand) made a game out of blending a smoothie at home with the Smoobo Blender. Bounce this space age ball around and the kinetic energy gets the blades moving.

all images via electroluxdesignlab.com. See the rest of the finalists here.
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Recipe for Business Opportunity: Include the Practitioners — Ethnography at work for Innovation
Research companies, like everyone else, are questioning their value. Like everyone else, they are struggling to push beyond the boundaries of their current deliverables. In their case, information is too fluid to rely on one definitive report. At the same time, I imagine that ad agencies might wish they weren’t called ad agencies. It’s like naming your medical practice by the diagnosis. You can’t give away the ending in the title and know you’re doing the right thing for every client. Surgeons cut. Ad agencies make ads. And last but not least, design firms prioritize physiological and aesthetic relevance but they do take the time to understand people and groups. They engage in ethnography to get context and use mapping techniques to spur innovation even if their business model does not allow for completely open-ended non-prescriptive discovery.
There are only one or two innovation firms that I’ve come across in my search for a job home that are really ideal settings for ethnography. One of those is WhatIf; they use experts with long backward trajectories in various categories to solve problems. They also listen with purpose. But WhatIf isn’t hiring.
I was recently asked how I would approach bringing innovation for new product development to a traditional quantitative and qualitative research company with most of their DNA in brand and advertising research. Here are the initial thoughts I offered. Though I didn’t have enough time to develop them further, I thought I’d share them.
‘The Constellation’ I talk about in this blog post calls for a shift in approach
A Shift In Approach #1
Look beyond the super-users and early adopters trend and insights experts tend to seek out. Everyone with an Internet connection is an influencer. The single idea or authoritative voice has been replaced by a constellation of conversations, ideas and stories.
Influence is multilateral. Everyone is pinging around from fact to fact, story to story, idea to idea. Those facts and stories are disembodied most of the time. The antecedent is not always important.
The constellation of input is what we have to look at.
A Shift In Approach #2
We’re living in an age of ongoing experimentation. Reach across disciplines and cultural phenomena for answers. I did this naturally but was really taught to do it working at Crispin. You look to other categories not just for inspiration but for insight into cultural resonance.
Recipe – the Secret Sauce
Traditional Quant
+
Traditional Qual (as needed)
+
Ethnography (deeper open-ended cultural exploration) that includes designers and other ‘makers’. Find those with a pertinent process-knowledge base and bring them into your research in addition to the end-user you are trying to learn about (not only as the experts they are but as people to learn from, observe, and explore with.)
Triangulate as needed.
Tools & Tenets
Consider all social, economic and cultural factors that effect business and consumers (locally or globally or both):
Visit innovative hubs in emerging markets to look for fresh ideas
Listen to world’s greatest problem solvers and cross-reference findings with best thinking
Engage in innovation research praxis: trends and best practices + practical concerns of the business at hand + research into behaviour and emotion –> put into test scenarios.
In a Nutshell
Innovation starts with observation.
A diversity of well considered perspectives increases the depth and in turn, the value of the proposition.
It is vital to involve makers (designers, engineers, developers) – those versed in design thinking and iterative process – for richer analysis and problem-solving.
Drawing fresh ideas from related cultural phenomena further shapes thinking and brings ideas to life.
Stuff I Like to Do or Lead
Self-documentation / digital ethnography
Journaling, Videography, Brainstorming
Sketches, mock-ups, scenario building, co-creation
Map the Marketplace, Category, Competition, Trends
Shopalong
Develop an ‘app-along’
Workshops for Clients
Designer / Developer/ Engineer/Creator panels
Guided tours
Also Incorporate
Protyping – 3d ideation or narrative booklets and videos of findings and innovation exploration
So…
Trends
Observational Research
Workshops
To create best products, brands, services, business opportunities.
The End
I think I’m now off to do more What Women Make stuff and combine my anthropology and truth-seeking with Peter Crosby’s human geography landscapes. More later from Barcelona.

Great Presentations
I’m putting together a proposal and doing some background research to buttress my proposition. Through yesterday’s research, I discovered some great ideas, which I’ll share in a minute, but first I’ll share a thought that occurred to me during the day:
Life used to be what you saw around you – the milkman, the neighbor, the car park, the airport, the plane, the landing strip, the drive, the hotel. We saw life in a direct plane outward from wherever we were. Now, life has become more like a land map, a blueprint or a satellite image – so many wires going this way and that, our life containing so much more than what our eye can take in – that we can no longer see our lives with the naked eye. This is such a huge transformation and so undeniably true and becoming truer by the day that I imagine it is becoming part of our psyche to flex a muscle that sees beyond the immediate environment. We think less ‘across the street’ and more ‘Hubble telescope’ because it’s the only way to get it all into one picture. We’re developing another quotidian dimension, a birds-eye instinct emerging. Another reason why we just can’t think or work linearly. Interesting, this thought helps my proposition a lot.
Now onto a few good ideas around the web:
I discovered Venessa Miemis:
“What are young adults thinking about money and value? How can we create new systems of wealth generation and abundance? What does the future hold for banks and other financial institutions in the wake of massive peer to peer exchange? This video was created as part of Venessa Miemis’ presentation at the SIBOS Conference in Amsterdam, 25 October 2010.”
I discovered Zaana Howard and loved her exercises:
I discovered a great and oh-so-satisfying article called At the Intersections of Design, Ethnography and Global Governance
…which spoke to my desire to merge deeper ethnography (spontaneous, creative, experimental ethnography and workshopping approaches to listening) with a designers ability to make incarnate the output of cultural insights that someone like me might synthesize but with words, not objects or actions. It do us all one better to take our thinking and filter it through design thinking – add analytical thinking, creativity, and cultural sensitivity together in the soup toward the purpose of dinner on the table.
Ethnographers, if you want to be a purist, aren’t really supposed to have much of a purpose outside understanding. At least not while they’re in action. That’s ethnography in its academic form which for argument’s sake, might just be a little too much self-talk (why I didn’t follow the academic route). That’s where this article makes so much sense to me in my search for a comrade in my desire to use ethnography for making things, services, communication, connectivity, the world – more interesting and more well-suited to apparent changes going on. Combining those who think in terms of design and those that think in order to understand and get at a wider truth can be a mighty powerful partnership.
Aditya Dev Sood, the article’s author, says: “socio-cultural knowledge and insight, acquired through ethnography and filtered through any array of disciplinary frameworks from the social science and humanities, while valuable and necessary, (in some prior experiment) was also (alone) proving insufficient. This was because cultural knowledge in terms of observed behavior and practice was being presented as observed fact, rather than dynamic operational opportunity (for me, why incremental application is great). To move from local knowledge to programmatic action was still a challenge, and this is where Design could play a critical role. Perhaps Design and Cultural Research and Public Policy really do fit together, as we had demonstrated to one another in our working group.”
He goes onto to answer the question of why ethnography and design haven’t always been natural partners (which I was wondering). He talks about ethnography once used for governance in discovering new lands (outdated, imperialistic) to eventually being relegated to academia, while design came out of the industrial revolution and was about adjusting to the industrialized mechanized world but now we’re reindividuating in our decentralized world – and that’s where ethnography steps back in. He goes on to create a great mental image of the loop of these two disciplines and how they can augment and further each others goals: “the sum of Design and Anthropology can be plotted as a line that courses back and forth without creating an area, a polygon, corresponding to new value” The article is fantastic, read it here. There is, as underpinning to his argument on joining ethnographers with designers, one non-essential logic that I disagree with personally, and that is those performing cultural exploration are shy and look backward, are not forward thinking, as opposed to designers who are people who think of what could be (hence the wobbling zig zag shape of their interaction). Maybe in academia, again, a purist making notes in the wild is only looking at what is, but personally, I’m propelled to look at cultural nuance specifically because of my inner futurist’s desire to see the edge of what could be (out there in kernel form).
1 CommentEthnography: Immersive, Dynamic, and Unscripted
Image by Swedish Illustrator, Linn Olofsdotter
Some of you are curious about the foundation of what I do aside from my passion for innovation and writing about women who create. I’m an ethnographer. I was an ethnographer long before I even knew the term. When I ended up in advertising, I would get frustrated with highly regimented approaches to understanding consumers (people basically, consumers makes me think of lever pulling and manipulation which I am dead set against).
I have always approached insights and strategy/concept building with honest, open curiousity and interest – and I’d like to think a strong dose of savvy from weaving in and out of different social and cultural situations. I studied Cultural Studies and Semiotics in school and then attended the school of life where I set out to find the patterns and rhythms of New York City’s inhabitants. Then I went deeper. And I went broader as I worked with diverse clients with subtle nuances and micro-cultures that required abandoning all preconceptions. (and moved country. twice.)
The basic questions that make this work worthwhile are: What do people want and need? How can we make manifest products and services that will make lives better/easier/more pleasant/more connected? How can we bring ideas and the narrative of business’ social role to life in ways that matter and are sustainable? How can we add instead of take away, drain, deplete? And how can we surprise?
I gave a one day workshop hosted by a consulting firm in Barcelona called Brain Ventures. Antonio Monerris, the partner in the firm who approached me about the project, is just one of those people on this earth that keeps growing, evolving, learning, always with an open mind and an eye on the future. Among those present were representatives from Pan Rico (bread), Gallina Blanca (soups), and Chup Chups (candy). Here’s the gist of the presentation part.
‘Ethno day’ can also work in two to three day workshops where we roll up our sleeves and go deep into your brand/product/service/business model – not just looking at the consumers but the folks that make up your company. That’s where the real work begins.
Definition of a Designer-Maker + 11 Things To Love
The apt definition of designer-maker given on the hidden art website is worth repeating here:
“Designer-Makers design and make their own unique work, on a small or large scale. Hidden Art promotes and supports designer-makers who design and make functional items in three main categories:
- Designer-Makers who produce hand-made items. For example, a potter whose work does not involve mass production.
- Designer-Makers who design and then in some or all instances sub-contract out the turning of the design into a product. They may oversee the making of the product, but they do not produce it themselves.
- Designer-Makers most possibly with a degree in product design, who develop a new design or concept, and then look for a manufacturer to produce it. Their ultimate aim is to become a pure designer and they themselves do not ‘make’ their designs into tangible products.”
Here are some things that I’ve run across and twittered about but haven’t had time, preparing and presenting my ethnography seminar and now my trip tomorrow to London to confront the onslaught of design euphoria, to share — but as I make way for more, here I give you a “check it out” rundown of all I’ve starred over the past weeks.
- Narrative Identities by Nadia Troeman, on dezeen.com. She’s created a color wheel identity and branding system that shifts and changes based on the culture of the student body. She’s a graduate student at Central Saint Martins.
- A retrospective of the work of Croatian artist Sanja Ivekovi.
- The Cardinal Club. Somehow eating in the private backyard of someone’s East Village apartment seems like the freshest idea. Not about a woman maker but, well, partly. Caitlin Zaino reports.
Supermarket Sarah, creative female entrepreneur. Like the Cardinal Club she’s opened up her home, a welcome respite from the maddening crowds of overwrought luxury stores and fast fashion stampedes. She moves between her Portobello Market stall and her home as Swiss Miss reports, “offering teas and cakes” to shoppers of her eclectic collection.- Repurpose. Weed through Margo‘s slapdash crafts page to find some real gems and inspiration. I can see someone re-imagining, for example, some of her work with china wreaths and swags.
- Paula Wallace, president and co-founder of Savannah College of Art and Design, guestblogging for Fast Company.
- A piece on the Women’s Monument in Memory. Female Victims of Political Repression, Santiago, Chile.
-

PIG 05049
Christien Meindertsma’s book of photographs shows the path of a pig from the day it is slaughtered to all of its disparate uses – and it is the first ever communication design entry to be a finalist at the INDEX:DESIGN awards.
- Jean Madden’s beds for the homeless, Street Swags, won the Index:Design award. ‘design to improve life.’
Lisa Maria Grillos bike bags write up in the New York Times, a feature entitled Plan B about businesses after the pink slip, reminds me of when I was similarly featured in a Daily News article entitled “Meet New York’s Newest Entrepreneurs” after 9/11. My ‘dog hoodies’ and I pictured big on the front. While my hoodies were indeed cute, a big hit, and told the story of my 2003, it takes a lasting passion for a product and its trajectory from homemade to a full fledged large scale distribution channel to make it work. For me, hoodies weren’t my longtime passion but I had a fun run. Maris Grillos bike bags show keen insight into a problem and if she can and has the desire to grow big without compromise, she may have more than what the Times calls ‘accidental entrepreneurship’ on her hands.
- Miranda July, filmmaker, writer, installation artist of sorts, and now… pillows!
-Chauncey Zalkin
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